Victoria Siemer and Elise Swopes—better known online as Witchoria and Swopes—have mastered the art of developing their photography styles in vastly different ways to equally vast audiences. Continue reading to see how they got started and pick up some tips on how to post to social media effectively.

PM: What got you into photography?

ES: I never had a true love for photography until I joined Instagram in 2011. That’s when I started shooting more photos and I still do it today with just my iPhone. I love the convenience of it. Having the Instagram community as an accepting place for art and photography is wonderful. I was never educated on how to use a DSLR or even a film camera. Being able to shoot with the simple touch of a button was super inspiring to me and I still love it to this day. I come from more of a graphic design background. I’ve been designing since I was 9. It’s always been in my blood to be creative.

VS: I was also classically trained as a graphic designer and had no formal training in photography. A few years into working at agencies, I started to get restless and tinkered around in Photoshop after work to make my first pieces, experimenting with stock photos and Creative Commons images. For Christmas one year I got a dinky Nikon SLR and I started to utilize that and teaching myself photography. That was also around the time I first moved to New York, and I was kind of lonely, so I spent a lot of time by myself shooting weird self-portraits and incorporated that into my design work to become a hybrid. And it started to slowly evolve from there.

Elise Swopes

Elise Swopes

Victoria Siemer

PM: Do you find that there’s a certain type of photo that is more well received than others?

ES: People are always so intrigued when I post a photo with a giraffe in it, because that’s what they expect from me. Your audience follows you for your brand, and it helps to stick to what you are naturally.

Elise Swopes

VS: I have a pretty large aesthetic range. It’s all manipulation work, but it runs across the gamut of photo, design, or type-based work. Different series work better on different platforms, some things work really well on Facebook and Instagram but others may do better on Tumblr or Ello. People expect very manipulated images from me. Some people are attached to different things; it depends how you are discovered, too.

PM: How did you get “discovered”? When was your big break, and how did it happen?

VS: My really big break happened in early 2014 when my Human Error series got reposted and then I got contacted by HuffPost, Cosmo, and someone had re-posted on their Instagram and suddenly got 30k followers in one day. It was crazy. I sort of stumbled my way into a bunch of social media trend lists and it’s been growing ever since. After that, I started to make a lot more work and get better at it.

Victoria Siemer

ES: I started Instagram in early 2011 and I think the team at Instagram caught onto my work and put me on their Suggested Users list. They left me there for a year and a half. It’s so crazy to be added to a list like that, because barely anyone knew about Instagram at that time. I got 100k followers just from that.

Elise Swopes

Victoria Siemer

PM: What’s a good cadence to releasing new work online?

ES: I struggle with consistency. Sometimes I post three times in a day, other times I don’t post for a week. I post based on my mood, mostly. Something I do to reenergize myself to create more is to revisit old pieces I’ve made and reinventing them.

VS: I try to post something once a week, but it varies. I have a full-time day job, so I have to do my personal artwork when I’m at home. For me, making work is 100% dependent on my mood as well. Sometimes I’ll take a ton of photos and not do anything with them for a while, then go through a phase where I’ll edit a bunch and then release them.

Victoria Siemer

PM: How do you deal with all those photos you collect?

VS: Sometimes I think I don’t like what I shoot, then I go back to it months later and look back at the images and end up seeing them through a new set of eyes and with a new intent. I’m big on hoarding, because I know down the road there will probably be a chance for me to use these images. It’s like making your own stock library. So when inspiration hits, you have a variety of images you can play with.

ES: I shoot hundreds of images. I shoot as much as I can and then figure it out later. I think having more options is always better—if you think you got the shot, grab 20 more.

PM: Does your loyal following go beyond the Internet and into the IRL world?

ES: The way I connect with my social community is the same way I connect with people in person. It’s important to stay genuine and honest and inspiring. Victoria is very real and her soul is out there. People can relate to that. It’s important to stick to who you are, and be on-brand naturally. I go to parties and bring my business cards. Recently someone asked me what my elevator pitch was, and I just showed her my Instagram. You need to show people your work and let that speak for itself.

Elise Swopes

VS: Keeping in touch with my current audience is usually a matter of consistent content creation. Keeping in touch with people outside of the Internet is something I’ve been doing more. Adobe MAX was one of my first steps to coming out from behind my computer and speaking in front of a large audience. I’m also starting to make one of my series more performative, and inviting people to take skin impressions with me at pop-up events. Going to events connects me to other artists that I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise.

Victoria Siemer

PM: What camera do you use the most and why?

ES: Right now I’m shooting with the iPhone 7 Plus. I’m always interested in seeing how the iPhone camera evolves, and it is evolving. I also shoot with a Canon 6D. I’m thinking about going to the Canon 5D Mark IV. I’m still learning how to use it, but I think having that natural love for art works in my favor. I get lucky with post-production work where I’ll shoot a photo that isn’t that great, but when I load it into an app afterwards, I can edit it and make it work.

VS: Right now I shoot on a Sony A7r II. It’s my first pro camera purchase. I don’t usually shoot mobile, but the iPhone 7 Plus is super badass. So I’m probably going to get that just so I can be a little more mobile with my workflow and capturing things that happen off the cuff, since I don’t have my gigantic expensive camera with me all the time. The only reason I try to shoot as much as possible on my Sony is because (besides the fact that it was super expensive) I like to make super large prints.

VS: I am completely the opposite. I don’t have anything on my phone except for Photoshop Mix and Lightroom mobile. I straight up use desktop, mostly Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC. Photoshop is my boo—we’re engaged. I’ve been cheating on Photoshop with Lightroom lately…I’m sorry Photoshop, but Lightroom is also really cool.

I also use Illustrator CC for some of more illustrative work and After Effects CC when I make my pieces move from time to time. I don’t use mobile apps very often because I sometimes like to print my work, and you need a high DPI to print really large. Sometimes I print things at 40×60” for galleries.

PM: What’s one piece of advice you can give to young photographers who want to build their following and get noticed?

VS: You should be passionate about your art form and put it out all over the place. Submit to art blogs, photo competitions, whatever the art form may be. Have a few accounts. Post to like 6 different places at the same time. Keep building your portfolio. The more you practice the more your skills improve. If your skills improve enough and someone sees it, it’s going to get shared, and they’ll do it because your work is impressive.

Another thing I recommend is putting yourself out there, participating in local events in your community and networking with your peers. Find people who are already established and collaborate with them, learn from them, get to know them. You need to be making stuff and probably have a job while you’re doing it. It takes a lot of self-discipline to come home after working all day to then do more work for your art. You can’t go into it with a sense of entitlement or expectation. I think it’s a mix of luck and working your ass off.

ES: I think if you really love what you do, it’ll work itself out. You shouldn’t go into it with the goal of being “Instagram famous.”

]]>1Lex van den Berghehttp://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/?p=88422016-11-22T17:05:21Z2016-11-18T20:34:56ZIf there’s one thing we’re learning with the rise of social media, it’s that creativity exists in many forms. Whether it’s an unlikely collaboration, mobile art masterpieces, or mesmerizing public installations, the breadth of creativity is as wide and accessible as ever.

Leveraging a potentially massive social audience to share this creativity with is another beast entirely, so we caught up with photographer Ben Von Wong to glean some social wisdom, along with his thoughts on creativity and The Creativity Conference, Adobe MAX.

On Social Media & Creativity

Aside from being an incredibly talented photographer, Von Wong also excels at storytelling. While his most ambitious projects certainly reflect this storytelling prowess, his behind-the-scenes stories via Snapchat and Instagram Stories provide a unique and approachable look into the photographer’s world. We recently got a taste of Von Wong’s social style when he took over Photoshop’s Instagram Stories at Adobe MAX.

According to Von Wong, “It is important to think of Instagram Stories and Snapchat as a new storytelling tool – not just a place to update individual snaps. It’s about taking people on an adventure using stills, motion, text and emoji!” In short, get creative with it.

On the topic of creativity, Von Wong quips, “To me, being creative is about constantly challenging yourself to do and create things you’ve never done before.” He certainly takes that to heart with his ambitious photo projects.

Whether shooting on an active volcano or under the sea, Von Wong takes his subjects to new heights (or depths). On his process of planning a shoot, Von Wong explains, “I tend to focus first and foremost on whether or not the content I create is something that people will actually want to look at. From there, it’s generally a question of problem solving and production to bring them to life!”

On Adobe MAX

Von Wong was invited to Adobe MAX as a MAX Insider, and was given enviable access to all the creative goodness that MAX delivers. “This was my first Adobe MAX! I’ve been to many conferences in the past, but none that focused on creativity as the main subject. It was amazing to see such confluence of creativity all happening under one single roof,” Von Wong said of the conference.

Von Wong’s three words to describe MAX? “Sharing. Creating. Synergy.”

BONUS: Behind-the-Scenes of Von Wong’s Surreal Lava Portraits

]]>5Lex van den Berghehttp://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/?p=88102016-11-14T23:43:07Z2016-11-07T17:26:12ZDo mermaids take selfies? In our second installment of Collabograms (check out the first installment here), culinary artist Kylie and illustrator Sukanto merge their skills to create a playful and delicious piece of art – a towering cake topped with mythical mermaids…taking selfies.

Explore the mythical and modern masterpiece from our next pair of artists as they draw, design, and bake up some creativity with their “Mermaids Cake.”

Mermaids

These mythical creatures represent a lot of different themes for Kylie and Sukanto. Mermaids have fascinated humankind for centuries with their alluring beauty, unusual anatomy, and mild narcissism. For these reasons, the artists decided that mermaids would be the perfect subjects to sit atop the cake, their own edible island.

Meet the Artists

Inspired by the Ace of Cakes, Kylie Mangles says, “the first big carved 3D cake I created was for an online cake competition called Threadcakes. I made most of it up as I went along and now, when I look back at my crazy structure, it blows my mind that it even stayed together, but I won third place and I was hooked!” Since then, she has become a full-time culinary artist, finding inspiration from daily life, cartoons, and children’s books.

Sukanto Debnath says, “I always wanted to be a painter, a traditional easel painter. I was never good at anything else, so that choice was rather simple and clear.” But when he began studying fine art in school, he discovered a love for animation as well. Over time, his skill set evolved to include digital drawing, character design, and illustration.

Their Edible Piece of Art

After the artists brainstormed and conceptualized the theme of the piece from halfway across the world, the creation began with Sukanto who sketched, designed, and illustrated the scene from his home in Szekesfehervar, Hungary. Then came the baking, which took place in Vancouver, Canada…

The foundation of the piece is a cake designed to look like a rocky resting point for the mermaids. Their island is a vanilla cake with sea salt caramel Swiss meringue buttercream and a sea salt chocolate ganache floating in a sea of isomalt, or beet sugar. The mermaids themselves are made out of modeling chocolate and are thoughtfully positioned together, while also clearly isolated from one another.

The separation between the figures is due to the absorbed (and perhaps obsessive) focus on their smartphones, unable to tear their gazes away from the reflections they see in the small handheld screens.

Kylie and Sukanto have assured they are not passing judgment on the selfie trend or the general rise of technology. “This piece was intended to be delightful and not a criticism of any sort. Just a snapshot of daily life, more objective than opinionated,” Sukanto says. They have created an artistic representation of both the connectedness and isolation that technology has created worldwide as it has infiltrated every aspect of daily life. And it doesn’t hurt that it is delicious.

It turns out mermaids do take selfies. Check out Kylie and Sukanto’s takeover on our Instagram page and stay tuned for the third installment of Collabograms.

I love watching new artists emerge, like 19-year-old college student and landscape photographer Taylor Gray and 20-year old commercial and travel photographer Andrew Studer. It’s amazing to see this steady stream of young photographers and artists surface into the creative ecosystem, realizing their incredible talents using Photoshop as one of their key tools.

But I also love hearing stories of inspiration in even younger kids, such as the Spark program that matches volunteer mentors with with at-risk middle-schoolers to help them with academics and skills building. Recently one of my colleagues at Adobe was matched with an 8th grader from Westlake Middle School in Oakland, CA and used his mentorship to teach him Photoshop. It was incredible to watch him grow from a child targeted as a likely dropout, to a confident and proud creative individual with a purpose, empowered by the tools to realize possibilities where he didn’t see any before – and even a potential career, “You can make bank doing this stuff?” – all just by learning Photoshop.

So it is with great excitement that today I announce a major update to the Photoshop product line. To download them all, go here:

Photoshop Sketch

Painting on the iPad and iPhone just took a leap forward with the introduction of Photoshop brush support in Photoshop Sketch. Take all of your favorite Photoshop brushes that you’ve created over the years, add them to a Creative Cloud library and they will automatically appear for use in Photoshop Sketch. When combined with the iPad Pro and Pencil, your brushes will take on a new life in Sketch. We’ve built just the right settings directly into Sketch so you can adjust everything you need while painting on your iPad or iPhone.

In celebration, Adobe worked with award-winning Illustrator and brush-creator Kyle T. Webster to create a customized library with seven hand-tuned brushes from his Kyle Brushes collection. The collection includes oil, rake and spatter brushes. These brilliant brushes can be used in Photoshop and Sketch on your iPad and iPhone. If you’re not yet a Kyle devotee, you can see examples of incredible work created using his brushes at his web site.

I am also thrilled to announce that we are releasing Photoshop Sketch 1.0 for Android today (along with: Photoshop Fix 1.0, Comp CC 1.0 and Illustrator Draw 3.0 all on Android). Download it here.

Project Felix

Adobe has always been a leader in innovation. We are constantly talking to our customers and looking for ways we can improve your creative process through invention. The work our designer customers must produce is undergoing many revolutionary changes – one of those is the need to create greater realism using synthetic content, while also producing results faster with greater flexibility in the design process.

Today we announce a new member of the Photoshop family, Project Felix. Project Felix gives designers easy-to-use 3D tools to help them create high quality images with photo-realistic effects without time-consuming workflows or 3D expertise.

2D image compositing is the foundation on which Photoshop is built. 17% of all workflows involve compositing. This crosses all customer types, all levels of skill and it is one of the fundamental reasons people use Photoshop – to add and change pixels and combine them together to create completely new things. For years, Photoshop has been the only accessible general purpose pixel compositing tool on the market for designers. Until now, these designers’ needs, and the limits of technology have been met by, and confined to 2D image compositing.

But now designers need compositing to deliver more, particularly around creating photo-realistic scenes from synthetic content – digital content that doesn’t exist in the physical world. You are experiencing a growth in new content types that support creating synthetic scenes – look at today’s car ads, furniture catalogs and major apparel web sites – many of the objects in those graphics are 3D models, not photographs. But the tools are still inaccessible – requiring years of specialization to master, and causing you to cobble together fragmented workflows across many diverse apps from numerous companies that lack integration. Yet the demand to create synthetic scenes, which brings significantly greater design velocity, content re-use, cost reduction, creative range and flexibility is high.

Project Felix delivers:

Easy access to assets. Project Felix comes with a library of models, materials and lights to help you get started the moment you open it on your desktop. Its integration with Adobe Stock gives you easy access to search, license and grow your arsenal of 3D assets and 2D images.

Photo-realistic results without 3D expertise. Create real-life effects on your composited images quickly and without performing multiple tasks, overcoming high learning curves or enduring cumbersome tools. Easily place an object on a horizon line in a background image just by dragging and dropping. Effortlessly change the lighting in your scene by adding a background image and watch as the reflections and refractions adjust to give your design photo-realistic aesthetics you’d get from a photo shoot.

Breakthrough rendering technology. Built with proven solutions from the 3D modeling industry, Project Felix comes with the most powerful rendering engine to date, allowing you preview your changes without making you wait for a final render to export. You can also enlarge the preview window to see details up close to help you ideate and create in a more agile, uninterrupted creative environment.

“I need to get my hands on Project Felix right now!!” I hear you. But reinventing 26 years of compositing in Photoshop is going to take us awhile and we’re not done yet.

Project Felix is still early in its creation process and not yet robust enough to meet the high demands of a professional, deadline-driven workflow. Before the end of the year, we will release our first beta of the project to paid CC members, so you can see where we’re headed. We are intentionally releasing it early in its creation process so you can give us feedback to help us build the best product to meet your needs. We want you to give it a whirl and tell us what you think.

Continue our investment in enhancements for designers with new font capabilities and interoperability with Adobe XD, and more

Lower the learning curve for new customers with new features that make it easier to begin projects, and find and learn tools; but also speed the work of our more experienced customers with UI efficiencies, click reductions and more

Add enhancements to recently released features like Select and Mask Workspace, Face Aware Liquify, and Match Font

In-App Search: Quickly search Photoshop tools, panels, menus, Adobe Stock assets, help content and tutorials from within Photoshop using a new search panel that’s right at your fingertips. Hit CMD+F (or Ctrl+F on Windows) to launch it, or click on the new search symbol in the upper right corner of the application frame and give it a try.

Get started faster: Jump-start design projects with easy access to presets as well as free Adobe Stock templates that you can access right from File > New.

Enhanced Properties panel: The Properties panel now displays information about common layer types as well as the document, so it’s easier to make precise adjustments.

Support for SVG color fonts: Access any SVG font installed on your system from the Photoshop Font menu. Great for responsive design, SVG fonts support multiple colors and gradients and they can be raster or vector. To celebrate this major step forward in fonts in Photoshop we are including two new free SVG fonts to get you started: EmojiOne and Trajan Color Pro. They are pre-loaded in today’s release and you will find them in the Type tool’s font drop down menu.

New Creative Cloud Libraries capabilities:

Libraries in Photoshop now support Adobe Stock templates.

You can now find similar images on Adobe Stock via the updated Libraries panel and you can drag and drop Stock search results from your Library panel right onto your canvas to start using them right away.

Right-click on a stock image to do a visual search for similar images.

Plus, Send Link has been updated so you can share read-only access to a public library. When you follow a library, it appears in your Library panel and updates automatically.

And more:

Improved Select and Mask Workspace

The Polygonal Lasso tool has been added to the task-space toolbar

Ability to view a high-res or low-res preview during selection

Improved slider behavior when using Smart Radius

Independently adjust the eyes in Face-Aware Liquify

Match Font now searches for any font installed on your system (previously only searched from a subset of fonts)

Click to commit text: Click anywhere outside a text box to commit it (previously you clicked on the check box in upper right of frame)

]]>25Lex van den Berghehttp://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/?p=87612016-10-20T22:21:14Z2016-10-20T16:00:20ZWhat significance do major scientific events hold without the ability to document and remember them? This was the question that spurred the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), the largest image recovery project in the history of space exploration.

What on Earth (or in space) is LOIRP?

On July 20, 1969, the first men walked on the Moon…but you already knew that. What you probably haven’t heard is that prior to that momentous day in history, a series of unmanned spacecraft travelled to the moon in the mid-60s to assess the safety of a human moon landing. These spacecraft, known as Lunar Orbiters, captured the highest resolution 70 mm film photographs of the Moon during the Apollo era. These photos were unrivaled until just a few years ago, creating perhaps the most important image collection in our lunar history. The images were scanned onboard the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft, then transmitted back to Earth, transferred to film, re-photographed, and studied to eventually help astronauts like Armstrong and Aldrin make history. However, in the long journey home from the Moon, the process of scanning and copying caused a serious decline in image resolution. Fortunately, at the time, the images were also preserved on magnetic tape, for computer processing to help determine the lunar landing sites. They were then sent to the national archives to be forgotten. These magnetic tapes were the only full-resolution copies in the world.

Fast forward a decade to the office of Nancy Evans, a biologist-turned-NASA archivist who saved this stored and long-forgotten collection of images. Though worthless without the rare (read: outdated) AMPEX FR-900 tape drive to read them, Evans held on to the tape drives, reluctantly leaving them to gather dust on her property in Central California for over 20 years. She had saved the tapes from disposal at the national archives where they were left to age in a NASA warehouse in southern California. During this time, Evans tried and failed to receive funding from NASA or private sources to restore the images due to NASA’s focus on more modern projects, so she turned to the online community of space enthusiasts.

Enter Dennis, Keith, and McDonald’s

By some McMiracle, if you will, Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing of NASAWatch came across her story and were inspired to found the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), also known as McMoons. When the tapes finally arrived at Moffett Field in Mountain View, CA, the team fatefully decided to set up shop in an abandoned McDonald’s due to its air conditioning (unusual for temperate California) and ventilation systems.

And so it began with a retired expert engineer on Ampex tape drives, a graduate student, two undergrads, and three pre-teens on summer break. This ragtag team began working away in the abandoned fast food restaurant, repairing archaic tape drives, and restoring scientifically significant images using Photoshop.

Photoshop and the Future of McMoons

Once the drives were repaired, the team slowly saw some of the most iconic images of space (e.g. Earthrise) appear before their eyes. This is where Photoshop comes in. The team used our editing software to adjust and restore these images to their former glory, not only to document and preserve the history of space exploration, but to ensure safety for future missions to the Moon.

The McMoons team has a multitude of other project accomplishments as well – helping to restore data from NASA’s Nimbus missions in the 1960s, working to recover space hardware, and alerting the world to the importance of data preservation.

Since 2008 and the outset of the project, the original facility, the abandoned McDonald’s, has remained home base; one of the pre-teens who was simply looking to kill time on her summer break, Casey Harper, is now the lead of LOIRP; and this project is expected to be fully completed by December of 2016.

As for the images themselves, they have been sent to the Planetary Data System, the National Archive, and the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. Many of the images are even being displayed in an exhibit at the New Museum of Los Gatos, CA if you would care to take a photographic road trip to the far side of the Moon. You can also donate to the project and museum here.

To all of you visionaries at McMoons – young and old, experienced and greenhorn – we on the Photoshop team salute you and thank you for your vision, tenacity and service!

Over the years, the Elements products have emphasized easy photo and video organization, editing, creation, and sharing. Elements combines powerful behind-the-scenes technology magic adapted from our professional apps with a user friendly UI and modes for every level of user to deliver an ideal mix of power and ease-of-use for creating and sharing your special moments.

For this release we focused on further automating the organization and editing process so that Elements does the heavy lifting and you can focus on creating and sharing. We’ve also expanded our selection of Guided Edits so it is even easier to get started and continue to bridge the gap between photo and video editing by bringing familiar photo features and terminology to life in Premiere Elements

As you’ll see, there are a number of exciting new features and enhancements to make your photos as amazing as your memories.

Here’s what’s new –

Touch Enabled – Touchscreen laptops and desktops continue to grow in popularity, and our Organizer and Quick Edit mode are now touch friendly so that you can simply tap to do all your finding, sorting, and quick enhancements.

Enhanced Search – Finding the right photo and video is always a challenge and with Elements 15 we’re making it a whole lot easier. Now you can find the exact photos and videos you’re looking for by searching on a combination of things, including places, events, and other favorite subjects.

Smart Tags – Elements now automatically tags your photos based on subjects like sunsets birthday, dogs, cats and more. As a result, you’ll spend less time tagging and more time creating.

Enhanced Instant Fix – And speaking of saving you time, we’ve enhanced the instant fix functionality so that you can quickly and easily edit a batch of photos at one time.

New Guided Edits – Guided Edits transform seemingly complex tasks into easy to follow step-by-step instructions that guide you to fantastic results. Photoshop Elements now offers 45 Guided Edits, including five brand new ones in this release.

Photo Text: Now you can easily transform any photo into cool visual text and add an embossed look and drop shadows to really make it pop. It’s great for anyone creating collages, scrapbook pages, cards, signs, and more.

Painterly: Convert your photos into unique works of art. Painterly teaches you how to paint an effect over your subject and then add textures and color themes—perfect for sharing on social media or as a printed keepsake.

Effects Collage: get artistic by adding multiple effects to a single photo. Tap into multiple templates and themes to choose one that suits your style.

Speed Pan: Don’t know how to or weren’t able to catch the perfect speed-pan action shot? No problem. This new guided edit adds a motion blur behind your subject to create the dramatic effect.

Frame Creator: A new way to create your own custom frames to complement your favorite photos and they can be added to the existing frame library.

Enhanced Filter Gallery – Filters are a great way to try on new looks and show off your creativity, and now it’s even easier to choose the best filter for your photo and fine-tune the details.

Layer Adjustment Guided Edit – Another opportunity to impress people with your editing chops. This new Guided Edit makes it easy to give your movie a signature look by applying effects across multiple clips or your entire movie at once.

Haze Removal – You loved it in Photoshop Elements and now we’re bringing it to Premiere Elements. New Haze Removal enables you to easily remove haze to make the background of your scenes as crisp as what’s up front.

Remix – We’ve eliminated the frustration of matching different length music files with your video clips. Pick any music file, and it can be easily remixed to match the length of your movie with a natural sound and transition so you never lose the soul of your audio.

Face Detection – We’ve added face detection to Smart Trim, Favorite Moments and Pan and Zoom, giving priority to footage of what matters most – the people in your videos – when suggesting places to trim. With face detection, you’ll get a great movie of friends and family without that unnecessary footage.

Video Collage – create dynamic collages with photos and videos that show many memories at once. A fun and creative way for sharing on Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites.

These are just some of the new and enhanced features in Photoshop Elements 15 and Premiere Elements 15. For a complete list of what’s new and improved, please visit here. Be sure to check out project tutorials here and follow us on Facebook.

We hope you’re as excited about this release as we are and look forward to your feedback.

– The Elements Team

]]>32Pollyanna Macchianohttp://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/?p=87372016-09-28T16:30:08Z2016-09-28T16:00:33ZTeaching creativity sounds like a tall order. Especially when there’s ever more pressure to be this magical creative unicorn who can make anything and everything under the sun. But it’s not about perfection. It’s about giving students an outlet to express themselves. Nicole Dalesio is a full-time educator and digital artist who does just that – she gives both teachers and students the skills to explore, discover and make.

Nicole was a grade school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 15 years before recently moving into her role of training teachers to use technology in the classroom. One of the major ways to teach creativity is to use what is readily available: whether we like it or not, almost all kids have a smartphone in grade school. Instead of trying to banish these devices, Nicole embraces them: “I often remind people that their mobile device is a creative tool and not just for consumption. There’s so much you can do with it. A lot of people diffuse the concept, but if you teach them how to use it, then it’s really powerful.”

Ever since Nicole obtained her first iPhone, she became more attuned to the world around her and took every opportunity to snap photos. It’s the magic of editing that allows you to fully express your vision, and Nicole frequently does this in her spare time when she’s not teaching others to do the same.

“Mobile apps are such a great way to introduce complex topics to kids. When they eventually go into professional tools, they at least have some background or foundation in those key concepts. A lot of these apps like Photoshop Mix are great for introducing concepts in the desktop version of Photoshop, like layers, blend modes, and making selections. This provides a solid foundation for students to more easily visualize and learn more advanced tools.”

Creative exercise is essentially a supplement to any learning curriculum. Nicole believes in the power of making digital media projects a priority. And more often than not, these exercises are turning more and more into a game of balancing different forms of expression. For example, Nicole frequently brought her students on short photo walks with their camera phones in hand, with the goal of shooting specific objects for inspiration.

“The way we communicate is changing. If you can communicate with pictures or video, it’s more powerful. We have immediate access to media, so it’s good to teach these skills to students in any subject area.”

Cultivating young people’s innate creativity is Nicole’s passion, and she sees an amazing opportunity in today’s education systems around the world to do this in new ways.

“We’re essentially flipping the status quo of teachers being the only ones talking in the classroom to students becoming equally engaged, with more creative and collaborative activities.” And, when it really comes down to it, learning is central to the education experience from both the teacher and student perspectives. Nicole shared in her recent TEDx talk, “It’s not just me teaching them. Through creative expression, I can learn from them too.”

]]>4Tom Hogartyhttp://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/?p=87082016-09-13T14:57:28Z2016-09-13T14:57:51ZToday marks an important day for photographers and photo enthusiasts. With the release of Apple’s iOS 10, the Lightroom for mobile app has been updated to support the capture of Adobe raw DNG on iOS devices. Now anyone who wants to have the highest quality photographs and the greatest level of editing flexibility can use their iPhone or iPad to capture photos in the Adobe raw DNG file format.

Many of you know Thomas Knoll as the man behind Photoshop, but he’s also the architect responsible for the creation of the Adobe DNG file format. Now that Adobe DNG is integrated into iOS and Android and is the default raw format for high-quality mobile photography, we’ve asked Thomas to discuss the history and benefits of DNG in his own words.

With that, I’ll hand it off to Thomas.

Twelve years ago, I created the Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) file format while I was working on the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) plug-in for Photoshop. I was spending a lot of time making sure that ACR could accept a variety of raw photo formats—I had to code for each camera’s specifications because they all used their own proprietary raw file format. And every time one manufacturer updated its file format, I had to do more coding. While this was a problem I faced every day, I also knew it was a problem that customers were facing on a regular basis with their own photography workflows.

I felt like there was a better way.

The big breakthrough came when I realized the metadata wasn’t all that different from camera to camera. This realization allowed me to create a file format that could read the metadata without needing specific knowledge about the camera. With that, the Adobe DNG raw photo format was born.

The Benefits of Raw

Photographs captured and stored in a raw file format are great for anyone who values quality and control over their photos. It gives higher image quality and more headroom to edit. When you take a photo you need to think about a lot of different variables—settings for exposure, white balance, noise reduction, and sharpening. The beauty of using raw is that you have the ability to revisit all of those settings after the shot has been captured to a degree that isn’t possible with other file formats. In contrast, once you take a photo using the JPEG file format, certain aspects like white balance, sharpening, and noise reduction cannot be edited—they are set forever. This drastically limits how much you can edit the photo when compared with what you can accomplish with raw files.

Mobile photography adds an additional challenge since the camera sensor is smaller than in a traditional DSLR camera, and editing after the fact plays a much bigger role. The benefits of raw, therefore, become even more pronounced when a photo is captured using a mobile device.

In the end, using raw and Adobe Lightroom allows you to create extremely high quality images whether or not you used the perfect settings when you initially took the shot.

The Value of DNG

In a perfect world, people would be able to shoot raw without the frustrations associated with having an array of raw file formats. With proprietary raw file formats, you need to wait until the software that matches your camera and file formats is released. Then, if that software needs a patch or an update, you have to wait for those releases. Multiply this times the number of cameras you own and it can quickly become an enormous headache.

As a photography enthusiast myself, I can attest to how frustrating it is to not be able to edit files because the software you are using can’t open those files. I also used to worry about my ability to open and edit these files in the future.

Since it is an open-source standardized raw format, DNG solves all these problems and that is why it is so important and valuable. That is even truer today with the release of iOS 10.

Becoming the Industry Standard on Mobile Devices

Apple’s new iOS 10 release moves us one step closer to this perfect world. Adobe DNG is the standard file format for raw photographs on iOS 10 and Google’s Android OS. With the two dominant mobile operating systems in the world utilizing Adobe DNG as their standard, raw photography is becoming more accessible for more photographers. This is wonderful news if you care about the quality of your images.

After a 12-year journey, the adoption by Apple and Google of Adobe DNG as their default raw photo format validates our vision of a need for a universal, open-source format. To work with Adobe DNG photos and take your photography results to the next level, be sure to download Adobe Lightroom for mobile. You’ll be able to immediately capture, edit and share your raw photos directly from your mobile device.

– Thomas Knoll

]]>14Lex van den Berghehttp://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/?p=86902016-09-12T20:56:39Z2016-09-08T22:36:51ZNothing is more dangerous than playing it safe—when it comes to creativity, that is. More often than not, the best ideas are inspired by a new point of view. And being forced out of one’s comfort zone, forced to see through someone else’s eyes, can be the very thing that breaks down creative boundaries.

For more than 25 years, all of us on the Photoshop team have enjoyed watching artists use Photoshop to reinterpret the world we live in and redefine what’s creatively possible. But creativity is boundless, so we put our heads together and asked ourselves: how can we push a group of artists to the next level to create art that will inspire us all to occasionally jump into the deep end of the pool and test our creative limits?

Collaboration + Instagram = Collabogram

What better way to expand your creativity than to expose yourself to an art form completely different from your own?

To prove our point, we paired up three dynamic duos who specialize in (seemingly) incompatible art forms and challenged them to collaborate and create something awesome together. Welcome to our first installment of Collabograms – brought to you by an oddly matched pair named Ken and Klem…

Meet the Artists

Ken Davis (@coolhandken) is a traditional sign painter and gold-leaf artist who got his start honing his craft with trace paper on stucco walls. Now, he creates signs that are truly golden pieces of art.

Klem (@klem1891) is a stained glass and tattoo artist who gets to create his masterpieces from 9-5 as well as after hours. He is a master of both ink and glass, creating art that lasts a lifetime.

This unlikely duo share a common love: Motörhead. While brainstorming ideas for their collaborative creation, they decided they wanted to bring together their contrasting methods to create a common ground – in this case, a tribute of sorts to Motörhead’s lead singer, the late great Lemmy Kilmister.

But using Lemmy as the focal point in their piece has a meaning that goes beyond their love of the man and his music – it’s what he stood for: zero compromise. Like Lemmy, these artists are advocates for authenticity always, no exceptions. One’s art should never aim to fit the mold of what others want or expect – it’s all about boundless creativity and staying 100% true to what inspires you. This principle motivates Ken and Klem in their everyday work and they wanted to convey that through this tribute piece, while paying respect to a hero who inspires them.

Their Rockin’ Masterpiece

Ken’s cool hand went to work with the gold-leaf and paint while Klem cut glass and soldered away and, after working together for about a month, their masterpiece was complete. Check out this video to see Ken and Klem’s Collabogram come to life:

This tribute to Lemmy is just the start. Ken and Klem are sharing more insider details about their backgrounds as well as this collaboration in an Instagram takeover at @photoshop, so be sure to check it out.

]]>4Lex van den Berghehttp://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/?p=86752016-08-02T16:57:51Z2016-08-02T16:32:16ZPhotoshop is one of those programs leveraged by a huge variety of artists and creatives to tap into their passions and assorted disciplines. In Alex Sinclair’s case, that passion is color, brought to life through Photoshop and the collaborative world of comics.

This wildly talented comic book colorist is known for his work with comic greats like Jim Lee and Scott Williams. On the heels of Comic-Con, we caught up with Alex to discuss his colorful career and collaborations.

Can you describe your relationship with color and how it led to your current career in comics?

Art has always been an important part of my life. When I was really young, my brother and I would read comics together and then try to draw what we had just read. We made these intricate collaborations and I would be the one who colored them.

I graduated college with a Studio Art degree so I was exposed to many classes and mediums. This not only allowed me to experiment with palettes and surfaces, but it helped me determine what my favorites were. It was right after I graduated that I decided to break into the comic book industry. At that point I just wanted to make it so I had pencil, ink and color samples of my work. When I presented my portfolio to artists and editors, I always got critiques back about pencils and inks. Each conversation always ended with “…but I really like your colors!”

Homage Studios, who eventually became WildStorm held a talent search every few months. I decided I would only send color samples in to see if I could make the cut. I got a call from Jim Lee a couple weeks later inviting me to come out and see if we were a good fit. That was 23 years ago so I think it is safe to say it was.

What goes through your head as you’re creating a color palette?

If I am coloring a cover, I always take cues from the art. The setting will definitely dictate lighting and color. I also consider what I have done for that series before to make sure it’s not too similar. I like cheating or exaggerating palettes on covers to help them pop off the shelves.

For interiors, I always read the script to see if the writer has any color notes on there and to get a feel for the mood of each scene. I then break the story down into scenes and create a palette for each. I make sure the palettes differ so the reader can immediately know that the scene and/or time has changed. As far as inspiration goes, some cover and scene palettes just come to me immediately and others take time and even experimentation to make sure they work.

Can you tell us about the kind of creative dynamic that exists while collaborating with illustrators?

Collaborating with other artists to create one, cohesive piece of art is my favorite part of working in comics. As a colorist, I get to work with multiple art teams so I am always exposed to different styles and art. This helps expand my repertoire and, more importantly, challenges me constantly. I’ve been privileged enough to work with so many talented artists who have all helped me become a better colorist AND artist.

Many of the artists I’ve collaborated with have also become good friends. This is a result of the communication that we have back and forth during projects. I always send finished pages and covers to the artists before I send them to the editor so they can make sure I captured their idea correctly. I think this open channel of conversation between us leads to a better piece of art.

I jokingly tell people that working with Jim is a blessing and a curse. Jim is by far the best artist in comics today and, in my opinion, will eventually end up in the top-three of all time. I’ve yet to see a page or cover from Jim that doesn’t inspire me to do my best work—and that’s the part that is both good and bad. His work is so solid and precise that I have to produce my best every time. If I am coloring five “Jim” pages in a day, I have to one-up myself 5 times a day. I also need to add that Scott Williams is a huge part of our collaborative team and deserved credit for his contributions. Scott is an amazing artist and his recent work penciling covers is proof of that.

If you had to pick, what has been your favorite comic to work on as a colorist?

The work on one cool project usually leads to the next so it is hard to narrow it down to one single project. I do have books and series that I am very proud of like Blackest Night, Flashpoint, Superman Unchained, Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman and Arrowsmith. I had a blast on Green Lantern, Justice League and Astro City too. There is one book that the fans identify me with and I do point to it constantly because it not only opened up many doors for me, but it also had me working on my favorite character with my favorite Penciler/inker team on a great story by an incredible writer. So the obvious answer is the one people get from me… Hush.

Is there a comic book or comic book genre you’ve not worked on before that you’d like to, and why?

I have been exclusive with DC Comics for most of my career. There are a ton of characters I grew up reading and drawing that I would like to work on for nostalgic reasons. My favorites growing up at Marvel are Daredevil, X-men, Iron Man and Captain America. There are also artists who I have not worked with whom I would jump at the chance to. Alan Davis, Frank Cho, Jock and Adam Hughes are a couple I can think of. And I would LOVE to color a Tarzan series for whomever decides to publish one.